Today, June 21, the heroic whistleblower
Edward Snowden turns 32. Last week while CODEPINK co-founders Medea and Jodie
were in London, they asked Julian Assange what Ed might want for his birthday.
Julian’s response: his freedom, the return of his passport.

Snowden was on his way to Latin America via
Moscow to seek asylum when the U.S. revoked his passport, leaving him stranded
for weeks in Russia’s Sheremetyevo airport . Now, he can’t leave
Russia. The leadership in Moscow has granted him a 3-year residency
permit but he doesn’t have the ability to travel abroad. Even Putin
acknowledges Snowden is trapped!

Edward Snowden’s courage exposed the truth
about NSA spying so we could work to free ourselves from it. Despite the recent
(largely symbolic) sunsetting of three Patriot Act provisions curtailing the
NSA’s reach, its surveillance and data collection powers remain alive and
well. But without Snowden, we wouldn’t have made any progress toward
gaining our civil liberties back.

People from all over the world have
contributed to the birthday TumblrCODEPINK made for Snowden to show our
appreciation for the extraordinary sacrifices he made so we would know the
truth about government spying.

Since the turn of the
millennium, more than 2.5 million veterans have returned to the United
States. These men and women have fought bravely for the values that have long
defined our nation: freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights.
Regrettably, the nation they served has not always kept faith with their
commitment.

The foundation of our
society is the advance of liberty. And this progress is won through the
resolution of conflict in favor of cooperation. Yet today governments have
sought to expand human conflict into a new domain that reaches the home of
nearly every citizen, the Internet.

Our Internet
represents the public commons of the world. It is humanity's greatest tool
for speech and association, for the development of peace and cooperation. And
without the consent or awareness of the American public, our government has
undermined the security of every citizen in every country - including our own
- in pursuit of an advantage in surveillance.

Having served in the
intelligence community, I understand that there are real threats in the
world. I have also seen, up close, the threat that an unregulated and
unwatched security state can pose to free societies. And you have no doubt
watched with concern as equipment once reserved for war began patrolling our
streets. But the internet reaches within the walls of our homes.

Service to our country
does not mean blind compliance to the whims of a few government officials
operating behind closed doors. Service means action: choosing to stand
up, even on your own, in defense of peace; in defense of democracy; in
defense of the rights inherited by this great society.

After World War II, with the Soviet Union a
serious threat from abroad and a growing domestic concern about weakened
civilian control over the military, President Truman set out to create a
separate national security structure.
[1) The SU threat was always exaggerated and 2) the “Cold War” shifted
into high gear in 1947 when Truman unified the military (Pentagon), created the
CIA and NSA, and above all renamed the War Dept. the “Defense” Dept. –Dick]

By Mickey Edwards GLOBE
CORRESPONDENT OCTOBER 18, 2014

It has long been the province of conspiracy theorists to claim
that the real power of government is not wielded by the obvious practitioners
of statecraft — presidents, members of Congress, the judiciary — but by secret
or semi-secret entities, real wizards whose hidden machinations send us to war,
sell us out to enemies, siphon public treasure into private hands. Depending on
your talk show or paranoia of choice, these are the bankers, oil barons,
one-worlders, war profiteers, Bilderbergers, Masons, Catholics, Jews, or
Trilateralists. Our formal institutions, in this scenario, are stage sets,
Potemkin villages; our officials are puppets; we are an unsuspecting audience.

Michael
Glennon, a respected academic (Tufts’s Fletcher School) and author of a book brought to us by an equally
respected publisher (Oxford University Press), is hardly the sort to indulge in
such fantasies. And that makes the picture he paints in “National Security and Double
Government” all the more arresting. Considering Barack Obama’s harsh
pre-election criticisms of his predecessor’s surveillance policies, for
example, Glennon notes that many of those same policies — and more of the same
kind — were continued after Obama took office. “Why,” he asks, “does national
security policy remain constant even when one President is replaced by another,
who as a candidate repeatedly, forcefully, and eloquently promised fundamental
changes in that policy?”

The answer Glennon places before us is not reassuring: “a bifurcated system — a structure of
double government — in which even the President now exercises little
substantive control over the overall direction of US national security policy.”
The result, he writes, is a system of dual institutions that have evolved
“toward greater centralization, less accountability, and emergent
autocracy.” MORE

THE SCOTT HORTON SHOW, October 22, 2014. In this interview on the Scott Horton Show, Michael J Glennon
[Professor of International Law at The Fletcher School] speaks about his new
book, National Security and Double
Government.

For a wider analysis of the US Security State don’t miss reading The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who
Benefits from Global Violence and War by Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree
(Monthly Review P, 2015). For an even
wider survey see OMNI’s many newsletters on related topics

When Edward Snowden began leaking NSA documents in June
2013, his actions sparked impassioned debates about electronic
surveillance, national security, and privacy in the digital age. The
Snowden Reader looks at Snowden’s disclosures and their aftermath.
Critical analyses by experts discuss the historical, political, legal, and
ethical issues raised by the disclosures. Over forty key documents related
to the case are included, with introductory notes explaining their
significance: documents leaked by Snowden; responses from the NSA, the
Obama administration, and Congress; statements by foreign leaders, their
governments, and international organizations; judicial rulings; findings of
review committees; and Snowden’s own statements. This book provides a
valuable introduction and overview for anyone who wants to go beyond the
headlines to understand this historic episode.

Later this summer, look forTed Rall's marvelousSnowden, a graphic biography of possibly the greatest whistleblower of all time, which Publishers Weeklyhas just named as one of the itsTop 10 Comics & Graphic Novelsof the fall season.

Mar 3, 2015 - Edward Snowden is ready to go home to the United States.“Snowden is ready
to return to the States, but on the condition that he is given a guarantee of a
legal and impartial trial,” his Russian lawyer, ... 2015 POLITICO LLC.

n August 1, NPR’s Morning
Edition broadcast a story by
NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from
what she called “a tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” That firm,
Recorded Future, worked together with “a cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of
ReversingLabs,” to produce a new report that
purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S.
officials that “revelations from former NSA contract worker
Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their
own countermeasures.”

The “big data firm,” reported NPR, says that
it now “has tangible evidence” proving the government’s accusations.
Temple-Raston’s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20
seconds to uncritically repeating the report’s key conclusion that ”just months
after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the
way its operatives interacted online” and, post-Snowden, “al-Qaeda didn’t just
tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled
it.” The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the
end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal
relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption
programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.

With this report, Temple-Raston seriously
misled NPR’s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit
that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To
the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with
millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it alsofiled forms to
become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions fromThe Intercept,
the company’s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for
the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know.
But according to public reports, Recorded
Future “earns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and
intelligence agencies.”)

The connection between Recorded Future and the
U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired‘s
Noah Shachtman revealed that the
company is backed by both “the investment arms of the CIA and Google.”

Indeed, In-Q-Tel—the deep-pocket investment arm of
both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)—has seats on
Recorded Future’s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future
as one of the companies in its “portfolio.” In
stark contrast to NPR, The New York Timesnoted these
connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: “Recorded Future is financed
with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which
makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its
clients have included government agencies and banks.”

Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back
in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her
profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by
gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has
“at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm,
called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into
the company.”

That is the company she’s now featuring as some sort of
independent source that can credibly vindicate the claims of U.S. officials
about how Snowden reporting helps terrorists.

Beyond all that, the “cyber expert” who
Temple-Raston told NPR listeners was “brought in” by Recorded Future to
“investigate” these claims—Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs—has his own
significant financial ties to the U.S. intelligence community. In 2012,
In-Q-Tel proudly touted a
“strategic partnership” with ReversingLabs to develop new technology for the
Department of Homeland Security. Vuskan hailed the partnership as
vital to his company’s future prospects.

If one wants to argue that a
government-mimicking report from a company that is funded by the CIA, and whose
board is composed in part of its investment arm, and which centrally relies on
research from another CIA partner is somehow newsworthy—fine, one can have that
debate. But to pass it off as some sort of independent analysis without even
mentioning those central ties is reckless and deceitful—especially when, as is
true here, the reporter doing it clearly knows about those ties.

Beyond
all these CIA connections, the conclusion touted in the NPR report—that
al-Qaeda developed more sophisticated encryption techniques due to the Snowden
reporting—is dubious in the extreme. It is also undercut by documents contained
in the Snowden archive.

The Recorded Future “report”—which was
actually nothing more than a short blog post—is
designed to bolster the year-long fear-mongering campaign
of U.S. and British officials arguing that
terrorists would realize the need to hide their communications and develop
effective means of doing so by virtue of the Snowden reporting. Predictably,
former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker promptly seized on the report (still
concealing the firm’s CIA connections from readers) to argue in The Washington
Post that “the evidence is mounting that Edward Snowden and
his journalist allies have helped al-Qaeda improve their security against NSA
surveillance.”

But actual terrorists—long before the Snowden
reporting—have been fixated on developing encryption methods and other
techniques to protect their communications from electronic surveillance. And
they have succeeded in a quite sophisticated manner.

One document found in the GCHQ archive
provided by Snowden is a 45-page, single-spaced manual that the British spy
agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook.” Though undated, the content suggests it was
originally written in 2002 or 2003: more than 10 years before the Snowden
reporting began. It appears to have been last updated shortly after September
2003, and translated into English by GCHQ sometime in 2005 or 2006. Much of it
is found online in
Arabic. The handbook appears to be an excerpt from a 268-page document called “Abu Zubaydah’s Encyclopedia.” The
encyclopedia, uploaded in Arabic to the internet in 2011, describes itself as
the “cumulative result of efforts of the brothers who walked on the path of
jihad” and contains highly specific and sophisticated instructions for avoiding
electronic surveillance.

The first section of the decade-old handbook
is entitled “The General Security for all Means of Communication” and includes
directions on how to keep landline and mobile telephone calls, emails, and
online chats secure. It also includes a detailed discussion of how SIM cards in
cell phones can be used by the NSA as tracking devices: exactly the subject
of the very first story The
Intercept ever published from the Snowden material.
The manual further instructs operatives that merely turning off one’s cell
phone is insufficient to avoid tracking; instead, it instructs, both the
battery and SIM card must be removed. It extensively describes how code words
should be used for all online communications.

So sophisticated is the 10-year-old “Jihadist
Manual” that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQ’s own manual,
developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep
their communications secure:

Long before the Snowden reporting, then, those
considered by the U.S. to be “terrorists” have been fixated on avoiding
electronic surveillance, which is why Osama bin Laden communicated only through personal
courier. The “Jihadist Handbook” demonstrates how widespread and
sophisticated these techniques have been for many years (GCHQ declined to
respond beyond its routine boilerplate claiming that its operations are legal,
which has nothing to do with this story).

Then there are the glaring and self-evident
fallacies in the report itself. The principal claim on which its conclusion is
based is the chronology that
extremist groups announced a roll-out of “the first Islamic encryption software
for mobiles” in September, 2013 (3 months after the first Snowden report),
followed by a new encryption product in December (“The Mujahid’s Security”).

But it should go without saying that this
proves nothing about causation; it is a basic logical principle that
“A precedes B” is not evidence that ”A caused B.” The original Recorded Future
report literally did nothing more than assert that there were visible
encryption improvements from al-Qaeda that post-dated the first Snowden story,
and then, based on no evidence, just asserted the causal link.

Beyond that obvious post hoc ergo
propter hoc fallacy, there is no question that “jihadists” have been
working for years on sophisticated tactics for communications security; the
fact that they continued to be after the Snowden reporting began literally
proves nothing.

Indeed, in September of last year, TheNew York Times made clear that
the “jihadists” began developing their own advanced encryption methods yearsbefore
the start of the Snowden reporting:

Al Qaeda’s use of
advanced encryption technology dates to 2007, when the Global Islamic Media Front released the Asrar
al-Mujahedeen, or so-called “Mujahedeen Secrets,” software. An updated version,
Mujahedeen Secrets 2, was released in January 2008, and has been revised at
least twice, most recently in May 2012, analysts said.

The program was popularized in the first issue of Inspire, Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula’s quarterly online magazine, in aJuly 2010 post entitled
“How to Use Asrar al-Mujahedeen: Sending and Receiving Encrypted Messages.”

Since then, each issue of Inspire has offered a how-to section on encrypting
communications, recommending MS2 as the main encryption tool.

All the way back in February, 2001, USA
Today reported that al-Qaeda and other groups have
been using “uncrackable encryption” since the mid-1990s; the 2001 article
stated: “encryption has become the everyday tool of Muslim extremists in
Afghanistan, Albania, Britain, Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Syria, the
USA, the West Bank and Gaza and Yemen, U.S. officials say.”

As has long been clear, “the terrorists” did
not need Snowden reporting to know that the U.S. and its partners are doing
everything possible to monitor their communications. It is certainly possible
that some extremists, like ordinary users all over the world, are
more conscious now than before about the need to secure their
communications—just as some extremists became aware of interrogation techniques
they may face if detained by virtue of reporting on American torture (which is
why torture advocates argued that
such reporting also helped terrorists). But the key revelation of the Snowden
reporting is that the surveillance system built in secret by the NSA and its
partners is directed athundreds of millions of ordinary
people and entire populationsrather
than “the terrorists.”

Responding to one of the criticisms about the
glaring flaws in its report (the obvious absence of causation evidence),
Recorded Future admits that “in
2007 Al-Qaeda (AQ) had one encryption product (Asrar) for one platform (PC)
which has since been periodically updated (e.g. in 2008).” They claim there was
a “significant uptick” after the Snowden reporting but still offer no evidence
of a causal connection nor any explanation as to what “the terrorists” learned
from those reports that could help them better safeguard their communications
or that would provide added motivation to shield those communications.

Critically, even if one wanted to accept
Recorded Future’s timeline as true,
there are all sorts of plausible reasons other than Snowden revelations why
these groups would have been motivated to develop new encryption protections.
One obvious impetus is the August 2013 government boasting to
McClatchy (and TheDaily
Beast) that the State Department ordered the closing of 21
embassies because of what it learned from an intercepted “conference call”
among Al Qaeda leaders:

An official who’d been
briefed on the matter in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, told McClatchy that the
embassy closings and travel advisory were the result of an intercepted
communication between Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaida
in the Arabian Peninsula, and al Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri in which
Zawahiri gave “clear orders” to al-Wuhaysi, who was recently named al
Qaida’s general manager, to carry out an attack.

As The Daily Beast put it:
“Al-Qaeda leaders had assumed the conference calls, which give Zawahiri the
ability to manage his organization from a remote location, were secure. But
leaks about the original intercepts have likely exposed the operation that
allowed the U.S. intelligence community to listen in on the al-Qaeda board
meetings.”

It does the U.S. government no good to
attribute these new encryption efforts to leaks from the U.S. government
itself. Recorded Future thus ignores that possibility altogether and
suggests—with absolutely no evidence—that it was due to Snowden revelations.

They do so even though The New York
Times reported a month
after the “conference call” leak that ”senior officials have made a startling finding:
the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more
immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of
classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.” The NYT added:
“The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with
what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism
efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A.
surveillance programs.”

Then there’s the completely unproven yet vital
assumption that this series of events—even if they happened this way—actually
helped the terrorists evade monitoring. Bruce Schneier, the security expert
quoted at the end of the NPR report, thinks exactly the opposite is true. He
notes numerous journalists, in the wake of the report, asked him “how this will
adversely affect US intelligence efforts,” and he explained:

I think the reverse is
true. I think this will help US intelligence efforts. Cryptography is hard, and
the odds that a home-brew encryption product is better than a well-studied
open-source tool is slight. Last fall, Matt Blaze said to me that he thought
that the Snowden documents will usher in a new dark age of cryptography, as
people abandon good algorithms and software for snake oil of their own devising. My guess
is that this an example of that.

Chris Soghoian, technologist for the ACLU
(whose lawyers represent Snowden) noted that these types of stories have been
emerging long before Snowden reporting, telling The Intercept:
“every few years, a think tank or security company puts out a report on the use
of bespoke encryption software by terrorists, and then media eats it up.”

In the wake of such criticism, Recorded Future
issued a supplement to its report,
this time claiming that the terrorists “are not using home-brew crypto
algorithms” but rather “off the shelf” methods of cryptography. But like
Schneier, Soghoian suggested that the developments claimed by Recorded Future
would make it easier, not harder, for the U.S. government to monitor the
communications of extremists:

If we assume that
these programs are developed and distributed by jihadist sympathizers, and not
an intelligence service, then the fact that they continue to develop new
encryption tools and advocate their use is only further evidence that they
don’t really know what they’re doing. Using terrorist-specific encryption tools
will only attract the attention of intelligence agencies. If smart terrorists
are using encryption, they’re likely using tools like Tor and PGP, the same
tools used by government agencies, corporations, journalists, activists and
security experts.

Then there are the bizarre implications from
embracing the claims of the Recorded Future report. For years, both privacy
advocates and experts in cryptography have published guides for how internet users
can protect the privacy of their online
activities using encryption programs such as PGP emailand Tor. Recorded Future claims
that terrorist groups are using “open source” and “off the shelf” encryption to
shield their communications: does that mean that anyone who publishes
information on encryption is guilty of helping the terrorists?

In sum, Recorded Future is a CIA-dependent
company devoted to spreading pro-government propaganda, no matter how absurd.
Among its lowlights is itsboasting of how it monitored media
coverage of Occupy Wall Street, whereby it claimed to detect Iran’s
“growing influence” over that coverage: “We recently Tweeted a shared link
showing coverage and gaining online momentum for the Occupy Wall Street
movement. When we look more carefully at influencers in this discussion using
our Influencer Map, we find that Iran Press TV is the second largest
influencer after the US Media!”

None of these serious
doubts, fallacies, or questions about this company and its “report” were even
alluded to by Temple-Raston in her NPR story, beyond a cursory and very limited
Schneier quote tacked onto the end. It’s hardly surprising that these kinds of
firms, linked to and dependent on the largesse of the U.S. intelligence
community, produce pro-government tripe of this sort. That’s their function.
It’s the job of media outlets to scrutinize these claims, not mindlessly repeat
and then glorify them as NPR did here.

The NSA phone surveillance program revealed
in 2013 by Edward Snowden is illegal, a federal appeals court has ruled.
(Photo: AP)

A federal appeals court ruled in a landmark decision on Thursday
that the bulk telephone surveillance program operated by the U.S. National
Security Agency and revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden is
illegal.

The Second Circuit
Court of Appeals in New York said the surveillance program, which swept up
billions of phone records and metadata of U.S. citizens for over a decade,
"exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" under the Patriot
Act. MORE

Anyone who
criticizes one’s own country’s wrongdoings is often asked why he or she is not
exposing the wrongs committed by other countries. Snowden’s reply is that critics have no
possibility of stopping crimes and follies in other countries. Only those of our own countries might be
known to us and possibly susceptible to reform. To attend to other countries would be
another distraction, like taking a luxury cruise, when the wrongs persist
because too few people are focused on ending them. At the end of the files Snowden had written
Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, he explained why he was leaking the files,
which Greenwald read near the end of his flight to Hong Kong to meet
Snowden. Snowden’s note ends with these
words: “Many will malign me for failing
to engage in national relativism, to look away from [my] society’s problems
toward distant, external evils for which we hold neither authority nor
responsibility, but citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s
own government before seeking to correct others. . . .I will be satisfied if
the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers
that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant.” (No
Place to Hide, p. 32). Michael Moore
wrote: “I can’t stand living in a
country like this, and I’m not leaving.”
President Obama, return Snowden his passport and honor our great
whistleblower! –Dick

CONTACT
PRESIDENT OBAMA AND YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

None of the senators or representatives publishes his e-mail
address, but each can be contacted by filling in forms offered through his
website.